The aging of Sonic Youth

The ultimate Amerindie band embraces the past, the present, and the future

Sonic Youth--the Grateful Dead of Amerindie rock. The sentiment seems, at first, improbable, if not laughable. After all, much of the Dead's appeal can be traced to the accessibility of the assortment of American music that inspired it; theirs was a warm, familiar blend of country and blues and folk-rock wrapped fraternally around the audience's shoulders.

Sonic Youth, on the other hand, has consistently challenged (alienated?) its audiences by drawing upon influences that exist on the furthest fringes of pop culture; their noiserock was born in the dark avant underground, where genius is found in an out-of-tune guitar and a feedback solo. One band invited its audience to pack their bags for the long, strange trip; the other almost seems to keep the crowd at a distance--the music has always seemed to be for them, not us.

But age has a way of catching up with even the most revolutionary rocker among us, and like the survivors of the Dead, the Youth aren't so young anymore: Bassist-vocalist Kim Gordon is 45, guitarist-vocalist Lee Ranaldo is 42, guitarist-vocalist Thurston Moore turns 40 in July, and drummer Steve Shelley is a relatively precocious 35. In addition, the New York-based quartet shares with Jerry's kids an almost metaphysical devotion to craft and a desire to expand the parameters of pop compositions--they're just a different breed of jam band, after all. It's a kinship that Moore, who's also Gordon's husband, can understand.

"There's a whole kind of responsive demographic there--a real sort of spiritual involvement--which is something that we've always been into ourselves," he says.

Further support for this theory can be found on A Thousand Leaves, Sonic Youth's new album. The disc is a sort of primer, a back-to-chaos collection that's at once overwhelming and underachieving--for every thrilling moment, every song that seems to have sprung from an unimaginable place, there's one that drones on too long and goes nowhere in a hurry. The album contains its share of extraterrestrial pop songs (the Moore-sung "Sunday," which has been released as a single); introspective slices of psychedelia (Ranaldo's "Karen Koltrane"); feminist rants (Gordon's "The Ineffable Me"); and ethereal items such as "Heather Angel." And it sports a loose, improvisatory feel, with songs frequently stretching beyond the seven-minute sound barrier. Sometimes, there's a reward at the end of the rainbow; every now and then, it's nothing but an empty, exhausting journey.

Moore chalks up the roominess of the tunes to a more relaxed recording method: The band used the money it made headlining the 1995 Lollapalooza tour to construct its own studio. "That was sort of our main ambition--to build a space that we could sort of workshop with," he notes. "So we did that and decided to spend all of our time in there."

Just as important, the players felt no pressure to hurriedly complete a new recording. On the contrary, they made a conscious decision to take a break from what Moore calls "the regular cycle of things: writing music, recording it and touring." As a result, he says, "we didn't have any kind of anxiety about ourselves."

Because of the calm atmosphere, Moore believes, the latest numbers evolved in an exceedingly natural way. "We always thought that we wanted to have these moments that are part of the songwriting process, with the playing together and improvising being the strong part of the song," he explains. "So by spending a lot of time on our own clock, we were able to cultivate that a bit more, like we used to when we were penniless apartment-dwellers in New York."

Nevertheless, A Thousand Leaves isn't a throwback to the feedback-drenched anti-songs that turned up on Sonic Youth's self-titled 1982 debut EP; indeed, the guitar gymnastics sometimes exude a vaguely '60s feel. Moore sees some common ground between his outfit's progression and that of earlier rockers; he points out that "a lot of bands started out with ambitions to enter the commercial mainstream, but they became more experimental, such as the Beatles or the whole West Coast thing. I mean, they would be more successful in their AM way, and then they would start freaking out more."

The Youth's latest lyrics occasionally call up ghosts from the '60s, too. This isn't entirely new territory for the foursome: Moore describes "Death Valley 69," a collection of B-movie Manson-family nightmares first heard on 1985's Bad Moon Rising, as "all about reconsidering the '60s, but not in a way that was sort of nostalgic."

However, the group has seldom dealt with the period as explicitly as it does on the new CD's "Hits of Sunshine (for Allen Ginsburg)," an homage to the late poet. Moore says that Ginsburg, who befriended the band in his later years, "was somebody who really was a timeline for the whole subculture and who really sort of helped shape it with his philosophies. The fact that he professed all this kind of otherworldy mystical humanitarian philosophy but infused it with a complete American aesthetic was really interesting to me. He was probably one of the most important figures in the late 20th century."

Writing tributes to dead icons is sure to raise the hackles of the latest cadre of indie types, many of whom already look upon Sonic Youth with suspicion. For instance, the fanzine Motorbooty lampooned Moore by placing him in the number-one position in its "Bank of Cool and Credibility Index"; the same piece rated the trendiness of other combos on the basis of how many Sonic Youth members were seen at their shows.